| Chapter 1: | Buffalo Creek Before, During, and Soon After the Flood |
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Well, the day of the flood we just milled around to see what we could find. Just drifted around. Nobody knowed what to do or what they was looking for.
—A seventy-year-old survivor of the flood, as reported by Kai Erikson
The Lord spared us, that’s for sure. When we come down off that hillside our house here wasn’t washed-out. So Buddy went out and told folks who was washed-out to come stay with us. We had families in every room. Everybody tried to help out as best they could. I recall one family from up the hollow come in that night all wet and cold. One of their little boys looked around at all the people in here. His eyes git real wide and he says to me real loud, “Lady, your floor here sure is muddy. You need to mop-up!”
Everybody bust-out laughin’ at that.
—Goldie Cummins, lifelong resident of Lundale1
The Flood: Facts, Precursors, and Immediate Consequences
Some Precursors, Premonitions, and Precautions
Just before the flood on February 26, 1972, “Buffalo Creek” was the name many folks in Logan County, West Virginia, used to refer to sixteen unincorporated coal camps that were situated along seventeen miles of what was usually a nondescript, muddy creek, knee-deep in places, and five to ten yards wide. Both the creek and the string of camps were considered to originate at the juncture of three small streams at a place conveniently called “Three Forks” by some folks, or “Saunders” by some others (the map in the front of the book portrays the current topography of Buffalo Creek and the names and locations of the coal camps). From there, it rushed and flowed, twisted and turned, down through countless ravines and hollows (simply called “the hollow” or “the holler,” in local parlance), eventually passing through Kistler, the last of the coal camps, and the incorporated town of Man, on the banks of the Guyandotte River.2 Railroad tracks and a two-lane, secondary road, Route 16 (the “creek road”), ran along and often crisscrossed the creek on numerous bridges from Three Forks to Man.